Buchstaben sind eine tolle Sache und deshalb hab ich mal wieder ein paar für euch rausgesucht.
kiezneurotiker: Ich verstehe die Dinge nicht mehr
Tja, is alles nicht mehr so einfach. Bleibt alles anders.
Das alles verstehe ich nicht mehr. Mein Kompass rotiert. Was ist böse? Was ist gut? Wer will was und warum? Früher war das einfacher. Meine Antifa-Fahne in der Kackbutze. Das war richtig. Der Gegner war klar. Heute: Ukraine. Schweiz. Pussy Riot. Putin. Piratenpartei. R19. Ich kann mich nicht mehr positionieren, weil ich niemandem mehr glaube und nicht mehr weiß, wo die richtige Richtung ist und wer jetzt was warum macht.
Konrad Lischka: Es gibt eine Marktlücke für gelassene Digitalmedien
Genau das sind ja die Sachen, die ich hier gerne verlinke. Und nicht ohne Grund sind die häufig auf Englisch und nicht auf Deutsch.
Ich habe da eine eigene Theorie: Den Share-Quoten und regen Online-Diskussionen bei De Correspondent nach zu urteilen nutzen viele onlineaffine Menschen das Angebot. Leser wie ich, die den stetigen Strom von Unterhaltung, breaking und nicht ganz so breaking news und immer neuen Inhaltsschnipseln ständig in Sammelbecken wie Twitter verfolgen. Diese spitze Zielgruppe – glaube ich – zahlt für Digitalmedien Geld, wenn sie etwas anderes bieten als das Nachrichtenrauschen, das jeder von Twitter und all den Aggregatoren kennt, die mit einer Flut an Schnipseln Publikum binden.
The Happy Hooker: Confessions of a Satisfied Sex Worker
Recht launische Schilderung eines Skandals aus der Sicht einer der Frauen, die in den großen Reportagen eher nicht zu Wort kamen.
It was 2008, and after nearly a year of surveillance, the FBI had brought down the Emperors Club escort agency, along with then-Governor Eliot Spitzer, setting off a media tsunami that lasted for months—and swept me up with it. From the FBI pounding at my door, to the eventual exposure in the press, to the $25,000 fee paid to an attorney who would defend me for the unthinkable crime of having safe, consensual encounters with other adults, it was a major, life-changing experience for me. There were moments when not knowing how to handle the sudden brush with infamy put me in a numb, emotionless void. And I often found myself in denial that it had ever even happened. I was just a nice girl from Oklahoma.
Letters of Note: Kurt Vonnegut: Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088
Erstaunlich, was Werbekampagnen manchmal hervorbringen. Und das hier ist von 1988:
The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature’s stern but reasonable surrender terms:
1. Reduce and stabilize your population.
2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
7. And so on. Or else.
Drones will cause an upheaval of society like we haven’t seen in 700 years
Interessante Sichtweise mit leider sehr pessimistische realistischem Ausblick.
You may not even realize you have been, indeed, living in the Age of the Gun because it’s been centuries since that age began. But imagine yourself back in 1400. In that century (and the 10 centuries before it), the battlefield was ruled not by the infantryman, but by the horse archer—a warrior-nobleman who had spent his whole life training in the ways of war. Imagine that guy’s surprise when he was shot off his horse by a poor no-count farmer armed with a long metal tube and just two weeks’ worth of training. Just a regular guy with a gun.
[…]
The day that robot armies become more cost-effective than human infantry is the day when People Power becomes obsolete. With robot armies, the few will be able to do whatever they want to the many. And unlike the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao, robot-enforced tyranny will be robust to shifts in popular opinion. The rabble may think whatever they please, but the Robot Lords will have the guns.
Forever.
Laura Simpson: I Went to the Oscars and Nobody Cared
Da gehen also auch völlig normale Leute hin. Wenn sie mit Superstars befreundet sind…
How did I get invited to the 86th Academy Awards, you ask? Well, my best friend took me as her date. I met her seven years ago at an event where we both didn’t know a single person. We hit it off over a mutual respect for Chandler Bing, and we’ve been eating pizza together ever since.
The Girls are Never Supposed to End Up Together
Es ist nicht ganz einfach, wenn man nicht zur Zielgruppe gehört.
I watched that movie with Ellen Page and Alia Shawkat, the roller-skating movie, the one where Ellen and Alia are best friends, each other’s only comforts in their podunk town. They need each other, and they hug, and they dance, and they tell each other I Love You, and Ellen meets a skinny boy who plays in a band. It doesn’t even work out with the boy, but that’s almost tangential. The girl was never a real option.
I think that’s why it’s really difficult for girls.
For me.
Tutankhamun’s Blood
Mormonen, Moslems, Politik und der Wahnsinn der Jahrtausende. Als berühmte Mumie kriegt man eine ganze Menge mit.
This has led the Mormon Church to invest vast sums in genealogical research, as believers scour the world for ancestors they can posthumously convert. Many of the largest genealogical websites are linked to, or owned by, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including Ancestry.com and FamilySearch. Rolls of around a billion names that have been traced by Mormon researchers are held in the Granite Mountain Records Vault, a climate-controlled archive buried in the side of a canyon around 15 miles from Salt Lake City. Genetic testing is a way to accelerate this process, allowing church members to establish ancestral links without the drawn-out process of researching family trees.
But while the church encourages its members to baptize only direct ancestors, some of the faithful have gone much further. Jewish groups, for example, became enraged in 2012 when it emerged that some Mormons were vicariously baptizing victims of the Holocaust, including Anne Frank. Other prominent names baptized by proxy include Daniel Pearl, the Jewish reporter executed by al Qaeda in Pakistan in 2002, and even Adolf Hitler.
So the presence of Woodward and a team from Brigham Young, a Mormon university named after one of the movement’s early leaders, raised suspicions that they might be looking for distant ancestors they could convert to their religion. One prominent Egyptologist talked to me about Woodward’s work at Faiyum on condition of anonymity: there was a feeling that they wanted to baptize the bodies.
Unter Generalverdacht durch Algorithmen
Wenn der Rechner deinen Text nicht nur liest, sondern auch noch analysiert und dich danach in eine Schublade steckt…
Einer anderer Ansatz, der ohne menschliche Unterstützung, ist der „Pointwise Mutual Information and Information Retrieval“-Algorithmus, der die semantische Ähnlichkeit zweier Wörter ermittelt.
In diesem Fall heißt das: Man hat ein Wort, dessen Stimmung unbekannt ist, und startet eine Suchanfrage, wie oft es in der Nähe eines bekannten Wortes wie „gut“ oder „schlecht“ auftaucht. Das kann man mit Googles AROUND(n)-Operator durchführen, der alle Suchergebnisse liefert, bei denen zwei Suchwörter im maximalen Abstand von n vorkommen. „Juhu“ AROUND(3) „gut“ liefert rund 14 Millionen Treffer, „juhu“ AROUND(3) „schlecht“ 5,6 Millionen. Wiederholt man den Test mit mehreren Referenzwörtern, bekommt man durch die Anzahl der Treffer auf beiden Seiten eine brauchbare Einschätzung der Wortpolarität.
